Shares in Standard Chartered rose today on the hopes that Peter Sands would
secure a last minute agreement with New York’s State regulator over charges
that it broke US sanctions on Iran.

Chief executive Peter Sands spent another day in limbo as Benjamin Lawsky and the Department of Financial Services (DFS) continued to refuse to clarify whether he would subject the bank to a public hearing tomorrow or not.

Mr Sands did not discuss the case with Mr Lawsky today, despite flying to New York on Monday to handle the case personally.

Traders took the regulator’s silence as a positive sign that Mr Lawsky would back-down on his threat of a public hearing and agree to continue co-ordinated discussions on a settlement behind closed doors.

Joe Echevarria, US chief executive of Deloitte, waded into the row by declaring that the DFS’s order, in which the accountancy was also implicated, was a “distortion of the facts.”

Deloitte was accused of “aiding” Standard Chartered to by-pass US sanctions and process $250m of transactions on behalf of Iranian clients.

Mr Echevarria told reporters that “the facts will bear out that we certainly held up all the standards required.”

Shares in Standard Chartered closed at up 1.5pc on the day at £13.54. They are still down around 15pc since Mr Lawsky branded the bank as a “rogue institution” last Monday. The regulator said the actions left the US “vulnerable to terrorists, weapons dealers, drug kingpins and corrupt regimes.”